A New Hotel That's A Technicolor Dreamscape

The 25Hours Hotel chain opens a bold new location in Zurich, designed by Alfredo Häberli.

Maybe it’s the rise of competitive services like Airbnb or the growing presence of style-savvy travelers, but it seems that the hospitality industry is increasingly using big, bold design as a selling point to draw in new clientele. Incredibly playful, bordering on in-your-face aesthetics are a hallmark of 25Hours Hotels; each of the existing sites in Hamburg, Vienna, and Frankfurt was directed by a different design team, and their choices aren’t always for the faint of heart. (Could those possibly be urinals modeled after the Rolling Stones lips logo? And if so, what is that guitar doing in the bathroom?).

Zurich is the latest locale to get its own 25Hours, a colorful property in the Swiss city’s increasingly trendy west quarter, helmed by Buenos Aires-born, locally based Alfredo Häberli. Under the charming theme "The Smile of My Hometown," Häberli has imbued all seven stories with his signature furnishings—everything from his Take a Line for a Walk for Moroso, to Vitra’s Jill chairs—and personal flourishes like his own handwritten suggestions of nearby hotspots, scrawled across various surfaces throughout the space. It’s not his first foray into architecture, having previously collaborated on spaces for Camper, Classicon, and Kvadrat, amongst others, but it is his hotel debut. And whether or not it’s to your taste, it seems worth a visit if only to experience the pleasure of lounging around on well-crafted pieces that most of us only get to ogle online.